Ponytail - Do Whatever You Want All The Time: Review

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Faust - Something Dirty: Review

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Gruff Rhys - Hotel Shampoo: Review

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Martial Canterel - You Today: Review

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Phil Manley - Life Coach: Review

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Sic Alps - Napa Asylum: Review

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Ducktails - Ducktails III: Arcade Dynamics: Review

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Jon Spencer Blues Explosion - Reissues: Review

Entering the world of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion can be perplexing for the uninitiated. The band’s roughshod feeding of rock and soul signifiers through a gnarly punk filter manages to pitch them somewhere in between pastiche and sincerity, where plastic showmanship and achingly indebted riffage is chained to buckets of sweat and a James Brown-like desire to entertain a crowd. Naturally, this is all best experienced in a live setting, although Spencer and his group have never had too much trouble translating their frenetic showmanship to vinyl, where they sensibly make up for the lack of physical presence by widening the Blues Explosion’s scope to include string sections, brass, female backing vocals, and guest rappers. Now, the Shove! label has issued a set of the band’s earliest works over the space of six CDs, which are packed with extra tracks, lavish packing, extensive liner notes, and all the Jon Spencer ephemera you could ever want in your life.

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Third Eye Foundation - The Dark: Review

It may be a surprise to some to see Bristolian Matt Elliott operating under his Third Eye Foundation moniker once again. It has, after all, been ten long years since he last threw on this guise. That’s ten years in which his former label Domino has transformed from a licensee of abrasive American indie-rock into a chart bothering mega-stable of talent; ten years in which Elliott has ducked away from the pulverizing drill'n'bass exhortations of yore and instead poured all the light in his music into his folksy singer-songwriter material; and ten years in which his unnerving ability to match spleen and sorrow and turn it into a palatable (and disjointedly danceable) whole have been subtly exhumed and worked into genres such as dubstep and the spurious witch house movement.

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Brian Eno - Small Craft on a Milk Sea: Review

In Michael Bracewell’s excellent book on Roxy Music’s point of commencement, Re-Make Re-Model, Brian Eno defines successful pop as 'the creation of a new, imaginary world, which beckons the listener to join it.' Eno has spent a decent part of the past couple of decades furiously back-pedaling from that conceit, via his wretchedly earthy work in the production chair for Dido, Coldplay, Andrea Corr and countless other artists who revel in the mundane instead of shifting listeners away from it. Thankfully, he’s gotten back into the business of creating imaginary worlds on Small Craft on a Milk Sea, Eno’s first album for Warp, which was born out of sporadic collaborations between guitarist Leo Abrahams and electronic composer Jon Hopkins.

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Antony and the Johnsons - Swanlights: Review

Antony Hegarty has only amassed a slim discography in his 12-year stint in the musical spotlight with Antony and the Johnsons, but the emotional gravitas of that work casts a long shadow over anything that follows it. His 2009 album, The Crying Light, was an invigorating intertwining of gender politics and environmental themes, but Antony has made the step of broadening his pallet this time, ultimately producing a less concept-heavy set of songs. Familiar themes still surface, with the natural world continuing to loom large in Antony’s conscience, but much of Swanlights is ambiguous and less easy to decipher. It’s essentially a set of love songs penned to an unknown object of his affections, all set to the deathly minimalism of the Johnsons, whose work beautifully atrophies over time, coming ever closer to devolving into dust with each passing recording.

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David Bowie - Station To Station: Review

Great strips of mystique have been peeled away from the recording process in our quest to thoroughly pull apart music history, ultimately de-mythologizing years of carefully created hyperbole and mythmaking. But there are still some obstinate beasts out there, a few hallowed recordings that are never going to be fully gutted and dissected, whose secrets are likely to go to the grave with their makers. Uncut magazine took a shot at going in-depth on David Bowie’s Station To Station a few months back, with distinctly mixed results. Producer Harry Maslin refused to be involved, guitarists Carlos Alomar and Earl Slick both claimed credit for the riff for ‘Golden Years’, and no one can quite recall how E Street Band keyboard player Roy Bittan got involved. And Bowie? His famous quote about the recording sessions is: 'I know it was in LA because I've read it was'.

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Grinderman - Grinderman 2: Review

It’s appropriate that the four members of Grinderman saw fit to don gladiatorial garb for the promo video for ‘Heathen Child’, the first song to be lifted from Grinderman 2. Their eponymous debut was a battle record, a chance to eviscerate people’s expectations, an opportunity to wipe the slate unclean, all executed with such visceral glee that it induced a disorienting feeling, akin to being told a tasteless joke whilst being punched in the gut. In many ways that album’s fecal tales of malice and animosity, punctured by gloriously atomised guitar and organ noise, felt like the definitive word on Grinderman. The only course to take once you’ve hit a particularly brutal passage of middle age — when you look in the mirror and see hair sprouting from your ears and receding from your head, where hangovers last for days and that belly flapping over your waistline just caused a trouser button to ping onto the floor — is to pick yourself up by the lapels, dust yourself down, and get your life back on track. Right?

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ATP New York 2010: the DiS review

The New York incarnation of ATP may only come around once a year, but few folks who have braved the charmingly decrepit surroundings of Kutshers Country Club can resist its lure. Most of the lineup this time around is made up of 40-something musicians who are lifers at this game, working every shitty day job imaginable to support themselves, playing notorious flea pits all over the globe, and finding a home of sorts in the shape of multiple ATP festivals. Filmmaker Jim Jarmusch is on board as a curator, porn star Ron Jeremy is stalking the corridors, Bill Murray is rumoured to be in attendance (false, sadly), and Thurston Moore is talking about hummus at a Q&A. Just another vintage weekend in the Catskills for what is hopefully now an annual trans-Atlantic jaunt for the ATP organisation.

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Ghostface Killah - Supreme Clientele: DiS Favourite 50

Supreme Clientele was all about bucking trends. It came hot on the heels of some distinctly limp wristed Wu-Tang solo efforts, as anyone who can remember Method Man’s Tical 2000: Judgment Day, GZA’s Beneath the Surface, Raekwon’s Immobilarity, or U God’s Golden Arms Redemption will recall. But while the RZA’s alchemical input on those releases was minimal, perhaps offering a reason for his most famous charges seeming out of sorts, he also only surfaced sporadically on this second sole effort from Dennis Coles (aka Ghostface Killah, aka Tony Starks, aka Iron Man). On paper, the recruitment of Juju from the Beatnuts, former Tupac acolyte Choo the Specializt, and Wu-Tang backroom engineer Carlos Bess (among others) in the production chair(s) didn’t exactly bode well in light of the RZA-shy solo Wu efforts that had come before.

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Andreya Triana - Lost Where I Belong: Review

The steady build up to the release of this debut album from soulful South East London singer Andreya Triana positioned her as an artist with impeccable credentials. An appearance with Flying Lotus on ‘Tea Leaf Dancers’ - from the Reset EP in 2007 - was the first inkling of a major talent emerging. Then, Triana hooked up with downtempo chill-out producer Simon Green, aka Bonobo, to contribute to his Black Sands album. Together, Bonobo and Triana sliced up a vast soporific landscape in which to work, where they could serenely slide into a comatose state while concocting quiet moments of 3am musical euphoria. All that’s missing from this further collaboration between the pair, titled Lost Where I Belong, is a husky voiced DJ to whisk us into the witching hour in-between each song.

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K-X-P - K-X-P: Review

To say that Timo Kaukolampi and his krautian Finnish group K-X-P have kept some impressive company during their nascent spurt of activity would be putting it mildly. Kaukolampi formally played in feted bands Op:l Bastards and Larry and the Lefthanded, and has garnered acclaim in more recent times for being the producer of Norwegian popstress Annie. When he started K-X-P, Kaukolampi quickly caught the attention of the folks behind Optimo in Glasgow, who have remixed ‘18 Hours (Of Love)’ from this album and were due to give the band a slot at one of the final nights of the club before that pesky Icelandic volcano intervened. Needless to say, this self-titled debut from the group has been highly anticipated in certain circles.

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Department of Eagles - Archive: 2003-2006: Review

The release of In Ear Park on 4AD in 2008 took Department of Eagles on a rarefied journey toward fully-formed band status after commonly being regarded as an endearing side project partially conducted by Daniel Rossen from Grizzly Bear. Naturally, every artist involved in a side project hates it being called thus, but the scattering of recordings that preceded In Ear Park never really gave any inkling that this was anything other than a couple of former college dorm mates messing around in their bedrooms for fun. Perhaps the pairing actually missed that status, because they’ve returned to their origins, ransacked various tapes, and put together this compilation of recordings from the early days of the band.

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James Holden - DJ-Kicks: Review

The ever reliable DJ-Kicks series is a small bastion of hope for the compilation album. The abundance of music available online and the ability to drag and drop files into playlists may make the mix CD seem redundant, but there’s still value to be had in a well-constructed set that has been expertly chosen and seamlessly blended together. The esteem in which the series is held shouldn’t be underestimated either. With past sets from Carl Craig, Four Tet and Hot Chip to consider, not to mention an excellent upcoming mix by Kode9, producer, DJ and remixer to the stars James Holden was practically forced to up his game to maintain the impeccable standard of the series.

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Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti - Before Today: Review

There’s a passage in Bill Drummond’s The 17 where he recalls traveling to Los Angeles in the mid 1980s, ostensibly to oversee the work of a hair metal band in his capacity as an A&R man for WEA. While trying to find the group in a labyrinthian studio complex, Drummond stumbled across a bloated Stevie Nicks, who was dancing eyes-closed to one of her own songs, lost to herself and the world. There are many styles covered on this, the first album by Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti since signing to 4AD, but that glassy Fleetwood Mac production, which flourished on Rumours, gloriously saturated their sound on Tusk, and continued to be an obsession for Lindsey Buckingham on later hits such as ‘Big Love’, is glazed all over Before Today.

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